Lease reviews change high-country land use

About half the stock farmed on South Island high-country runs could disappear if all pastoral leaseholders opt for tenure review.

It has been estimated that 500,000 stock units earning about $30 million a year could eventually be replaced by a diversity of land uses. There are 300 leases, including about 200 in Otago.

For more than 100 years, farmers have been able to pay low rentals to use Crown land in the South Island high-country for grazing.

The pastoral leases last for 33 years with perpetual right of renewal, and farmers pay about one-quarter of the market rental.

The leases restrict use of the land for purposes other than grazing, such as tourism or forestry.

But leaseholders who wish to diversify can now apply to the Commissioner of Crown Lands, who will consider "inherent values" when deciding whether the Crown might sell.

The Crown Pastoral Land Act allows leaseholders to freehold their commercial land by transferring areas with high conservation, Maori or historic values to the Crown.

The leaseholders must negotiate over which land will be retained by the Crown, in a process advocated by the Government as opening the way for greater diversification of high-country land use and increasing public access to the region.

The first lease freeholded under the act, at Pukaki Downs Station, gave Lester and Robin Baikie title to 3900ha on the 12,000ha property near Mt Cook.

The couple plan to subdivide some of their freehold land and sell sections beside Lake Pukaki for lifestyle blocks.

Some critics of the process have said that farmers who damaged thousands of hectares through overgrazing and tussock burning would dump the degraded land on the Department of Conservation and freehold the useful areas.

But Federated Farmers' high-country committee chairman, John Davis, said farmers would push for "multiple use" of tussock land wanted by both the department and farmers.

The discovery of significant inherent values should not mean part of a property automatically went to the conservation estate, he said.

Typically, about a third of a lease was productive land, a third was of limited use and the remainder was contested by both sides.

"What we're saying is we want to achieve a better balance."

Federated Farmers members will soon meet officials from Land Information New Zealand and DoC to discuss their role.

Mr Davis said that judging by the split of properties well into the tenure review process, more land was going to conservation than was being freeholded for farming.

- NZPA